Tag Archives: Forbes
Unit of Forbes stops paying rent on building
by Chris Roush
Craig Karmin of The Wall Street Journal reports that a unit of Forbes — a completely separate non-Forbes Media entity — has stopped paying rent on a Fifth Avenue building space (90 Fifth Ave.) in Manhattan.
Karmin writes, “Because of those missed payments, Atlanta-based real-estate investor Jamestown is likely to walk away from an agreement to acquire the building for about $115 million, these people say. Forbes stopped paying its rent shortly after Jamestown agreed to buy the property in July, people say.
“Forbes Media spokeswoman Mia Carbonell declined to comment on whether or not a Forbes unit had missed rent payments at the building.
“But she said Forbes Media ‘is on solid financial footing, and the company is profitable.’
“The building is owned by New York real-estate developer RFR, which is exploring legal options, according to a person with knowledge of the situation.
“Forbes moved its online staff, video team and other employees out of the building a while ago. But it still has a lease there that runs to 2020 for about 110,000 of the building’s 140,000 square feet, people said.
“A unit of Forbes Inc. has been paying roughly $8 million a year to rent the space, said a person with knowledge of the property. That price is above market for that part of the city, some brokers said.”
Read more here.
Building a dynamic news model
by Chris Roush
Lewis Dvorkin, the chief product officer of Forbes, writes about how the business news magazine has built a dynamic business model in a time of dramatic industry change.
Dvorkin writes, “FORBES is serving that audience by opening the closed world of traditional journalism to a broad network of hand-picked knowledge contributors, a great many part of a novel incentive pay program tied to attracting loyal followers. We’re now producing 400 to 500 original posts a day — sometimes 25 or more for the same breaking story — using a set of distributed publishing tools that are the best in the business (we didn’t miss a beat during the hurricane that crippled the New York region last week) . The days of a hierarchical newsroom structure that decides what and what isn’t worth a sidebar are over. As I said, the audience craves whatever tidbit and unique perspective the knowledgeable person can deliver.
“Our full-time staff reporters, initially a bit skeptical of the plan, have certainly come around. They appreciate our nearly 1,000 contributors, many journalists just like they are. Others are authors, academics, business leaders and topic experts — some even past or current ‘sources.’ I am often asked what’s the difference between a reporter and a contributor. The answer: reporters report and our passionate contributors provide information and perspective they’ve gleaned from life-long careers in their chosen profession.
“Staffers also take pride that we have an engaged, growing audience — from 15 million unique visitors in October 2010, to 25 million a year later, to 37.5 million last month (as measured by Omniture). comScore’s numbers show that FORBES is the only site in our category with consistent year-over-year audience growth on a monthly basis. In fact, other sites, according to the comScore numbers, have suffered double-digit declines.
“We’ve come a long way since launching our hybrid content model (staff reporters plus contributors) two years ago. FORBES content is far more relevant than ever, shared widely across the social Web (sometimes 100,000 shares a day).”
Read more here.
Covering the billionaire beat
by Chris Roush
Christine Haughney of The New York Times writes about the latest issue of Bloomberg Markets, which features 200 billionaires and aims to cut into Forbes long-held dominance in covering the super rich.
Haughney writes, “The latest issue is part of Bloomberg’s broader plan to capture a reporting thread that Forbes has dominated for decades. Last year, Matthew G. Miller, former global wealth editor at Forbes Media, said that at Forbes he had been struggling to cover the wealthy with a rapidly diminishing pool of reporters. When he moved to Bloomberg last year, he suddenly had its 1,600 journalists spread across 72 countries to help him cover the world’s billionaires.
“In March, Bloomberg started publishing on its terminal a ranking of the world’s billionaires that it updates daily based on how their fortunes are doing. Mr. Miller said that since he came on board last year, Bloomberg reporters have discovered more than 40 hidden billionaires. These billionaires include several women that the Forbes list had not uncovered like Elaine Marshall, a major shareholder of Koch Industries, and Dirce Camargo, Brazil’s richest woman, who is worth $13.4 billion.
“‘Our reporters are essentially billionaire-hunters,’ said Mr. Miller. ‘Our reporters are constantly calling these billionaires. Some of them are on speed-dial.’
“Bloomberg executives stressed how important this coverage is since these billionaires control so much of the world’s wealth. Ronald Henkoff, Bloomberg Markets’ editor, said the 200 billionaires on the Bloomberg list have a net worth of $2.7 trillion, which is about the gross domestic product of France. Matt Winkler, the editor in chief of Bloomberg News, said he planned to build on this coverage.”
Read more here.
Forbes unveils new tagline
by Chris Roush
Steve McClellan of Media Daily News writes about Forbes magazine’s new tagline and advertising campaign.
McClellan writes, “The print and online campaign will feature mini-profiles of entrepreneurs recently featured on Forbes covers who ‘exemplify what it takes to be truly successful today.’ The campaign also introduces a new positioning tagline for the 95-year-old publication — ‘Change The World’ — that will appear across Forbes’ print and digital properties. Previously the company’s motto was ‘The Capitalist Tool.’
“According to Kantar Media, Forbes Inc. spent close to $3 million on ads in 2011. But the company declined to say how much it was spending on the new campaign.
“Forbes’ New York-based ad shop Gyro created the campaign and is placing the media for it. The print ads will begin appearing this month in New York magazine. Later this year, the campaign will run in Newsweek, The New York Observer, The Week, Automobile, Motor Trend, The Financial Times and the International Herald Tribune. ‘Change the World’ messaging will also appear across Forbes digital properties, including Forbes.com.
“One new ad features the Internet entrepreneur Sean Parker who helped revolutionize the music business with his audio file-sharing site Napster. He was also president of Facebook during the social network’s formative years. The copy in the Parker ad reads: ‘Make more than money. Make history. Sean Parker, serial entrepreneur, Forbes cover October 2011.’”
Forbes content to appear in ads
by Chris Roush
Charlie Warzel of AdWeek reports that Forbes content will appear in ads for blue-chip companies as part of a deal with Martini Media.
Warzel writes, “The ads will let the marketer surround their own rich media with Forbes articles that are specific to the brand’s message. For example, one launch client, Emirates Airlines, will include in its ad travel and thought leader-related articles from Forbes that are aimed at high-income executives. When the Forbes link is clicked, the ad unit will redirect to Forbes’ site, where the sponsor’s ad content will surround the article.
“Advertisers will be able to choose from any Forbes staff-written content, and their bylines and photos may appear in the ad as well. The ads will then run as IAB Rising Star portrait units across Forbes‘ and Martini’s publishing networks, which includes such sites as Salon, LexisNexis and Kayak.
“It’s not uncommon for a publisher to seek wider distribution of its content; what’s unusual about this deal is that the content is being distributed outside the publisher’s own site. It’s a bold move, even for a publisher like Forbes, which radically broke with church-state convention in 2010 when it let advertisers publish alongside staffers in an overhaul of its print and Web products. While the marketers’ posts carry a BrandVoice logo, they, by design, look just like the editorial-produced content.”
Read more here.
Half of Forbes revenue will come from digital
by Chris Roush
For the first time, half of Forbes Inc.’s revenues will come from its digital businesses, according to Meredith Levien, the business media company’s chief revenue officer.
“Although Levien declined to share dollar figures, she credited the strong growth to a variety of initiatives, including the company’s BrandVoice product, which allows marketers to create custom content on the site; bigger, more interactive ad formats, including IAB-blessed ‘Rising Star’ units; and its embrace of programmatic selling, making online inventory available for public bidding on the company’s own ad exchange, the Forbes Audience Network.”
Read more here.
Forbes is a disrupter in journalism
by Chris Roush
Clayton M. Christensen, David Skok and James Allworth write in the latest Nieman Reports about disrupters in journalism, and include Forbes magazine.
They write, “Take the example of Forbes magazine. Executives at Forbes understand that you cannot run a news business and produce quality content in the digital era with a cost structure built for analog times. The biweekly publication’s website has changed the traditional role of the editor. Editors still manage staff reporters but their working relationship with freelancers has changed. Instead of giving them assignments and editing their stories, editors now manage a network of roughly 1,000 contributors — authors, academics, freelance journalists, topic experts, and business leaders, all focused around particular subjects of interest — who post their own stories and are accountable for their own individual metrics. According to Lewis DVorkin, chief product officer at Forbes, 25 percent of the content budget is now dedicated to contributors, who wrote a total of nearly 100,000 posts last year.
“With a focus on niche subjects and a network of bloggers who write posts and curate work on these subjects from other publications, Forbes attracts new contributors and facilitates conversation across the network, driving more traffic to the company’s sites. As DVorkin describes it, ‘Talented people want to belong to a respected network, and that’s what we’ve built and continue to build.’ This new system has resulted in a network effect whereby contributors generate their own loyal followings under the Forbes umbrella. In one year, Forbes doubled the number of unique visitors to its website. Referrals from social networks rose from 2 percent to 15 percent of the traffic to Forbes’s digital properties, and search engine traffic increased from 18 percent to 32 percent of the total traffic.
“Every newsroom’s reporting strengths will be unique, and the challenge is for the news manager to assess a newsroom’s unique strengths. If the strength is local reporting, how can the newsroom derive more value from its content? How can it expand local reporting capabilities? How can the newsroom develop innovative products and applications — and how can it do this while reducing the cost?”
Read more here.
Leveraging social media as a business journalist
by KBlessing
The public nature of Twitter lends to a two-way conversation that allows reporters to source stories and connect with their audience, said Forbes Media LLC science and medicine reporter Mathew Herper in a conference call for contributing blog writers Thursday.
“It’s like a cocktail party in a bar where everyone is shouting,” Herper said in the conference call from New York. “Twitter is a great way to meet colleagues, competitors and sources.”
The ability to have a public conversation on Twitter also helps to draw in an audience interested in a reporter’s beat and allows a journalist to raise his or her profile by tweeting links to articles.
Herper, however, warned that the main point of Twitter is for engaging in conversation and sourcing, and that it doesn’t generate as much traffic to stories as other social media platforms, such as Facebook. While journalists should talk to people they want to get to know, they also shouldn’t dominate the conversation or ask for retweets and follows.
Sourcing
“You can find industry groups on Twitter and have really technical conversations in short format,” Herper said. “Anyone can follow and join in. It has a ‘free-for-all’ brawl feeling that you can’t get through any other medium.”
Herper said that he has written entire articles where he did almost all of his sourcing on Twitter.
“I’ve quoted from tweets directly, and without asking,” Herper said. “But only from sources that I know.”
When asked about potentially exposing sources through Twitter conversations, Herper said that most of is sources are not a secret, and that if he planned to talk to a source off the record, he would never do this via social media. Most often said that these sorts of conversations happen via phone, he said.
Twitter is “more public than a public square,” Herper reminded the contributing writers during the call.
“Tweets are public unless someone has them locked,” Herper said. “And even then, I would assume that they are public because people can easily retweet them.”
Journalists also should remember that because tweets are 140 characters or less, they can more easily cross the line into being misunderstood, and minor disagreements can appear to be major fights.
To avoid getting into these kinds of situations, Herper advised Forbes contributors to stay on subject, and to know that subject well.
Raising your journalistic profile via Twitter
While Twitter can be used to share links of stories that journalists have written themselves, this often isn’t the best way to engage an audience on Twitter and attract a following, Herper said.
“Twitter doesn’t share a story well for days. That’s not what it’s for,” Herper said.
Because tweeting links doesn’t generate as much traffic as other social media, the best way to use it is for topical conversations and engaging with followers on a personal basis.
Herper recommended finding groups of people that interest you and begin conversations by following them. Engaging with and meeting new sources in this way help to drive new story ideas.
“You can maximize traffic from Twitter by being in the conversation with people who are interested in your stuff,” Herper said.
Retweeting stories that are interesting to a journalists but not necessarily their own can help to increase their following.
“I don’t think worrying about what time you should tweet or tweeting about trending topics is a good way to use twitter. It’s okay to tweet at a time when people don’t tend to be listening as much, and then again in the morning,” Herper said. “If you repeat yourself a little, people don’t tend to mind as much on Twitter.”
And if all else fails?
“Get Justin Bieber to retweet your story. That’s the most clicks on a story I’ve ever gotten from Twitter.”
How news content produced by advertisers is good for business
by Chris Roush
Forbes chief product officer Lewis Dvorkin writes about the business magazine’s BrandVoice, which allows companies to provide content for its website.
Dvorkin writes, “Two years ago, we launched AdVoice, renamed BrandVoice last week, as a way for brands to use the same publishing tools I do to create, curate and distribute their expert content in a credible news environment. SAP was our first digital partner and Cadillac our first print partner. Since then, Microsoft, Dell, Merrill Lynch, NetApp, Gyro– and most recently Oracle — have all used our tools. UPS, BMO Harris Bank and Capital One will start posting soon. Northwestern Mutual Life, Aflac, United Airlines, Toyota and others have used the print program.
“BrandVoice and similar content marketing initiatives can be discomforting for traditional journalists. They needn’t be. Those of us with long careers in journalism have moved in and out of the gray zone between journalism and advertising. Special features, special sections, sponsored content and similar revenue-driving content features involve editorial conflicts that result in professional compromises, some more uncomfortable than others. Products like BrandVoice draw a bright shiny line between journalist and marketer for all to see. The critical requirement is transparency, which means proper identification and labeling.
“Like journalists, marketers are learning it’s work to attract news consumers and a following in the digital age. What’s a Facebook Like really worth? How often do Twitter followers actually read 140 characters ? Not every post on Forbes.com gets tens of thousands of page views, nor do videos get as many streams. You need to be timely, relevant and authentic in this new era. You need to give up a measure of control, difficult for news veterans reliant on editing hierarchies and advertising executives determined to lock down the message.”
Read more here.
Why there’s so much Apple coverage
by Chris Roush
Tim Worstall writes on Forbes.com about why there is so much coverage about Apple in the business news media.
Worstall writes, “Apple is the world’s most valuable company for example. It has, in the past decade, entirely revolutionised two parts of the consumer electronics business. Indeed, the smartphone, which the iPhone was the first decent implementation of, looks like becoming the fastest adopted technology ever in the history of the entire human species so far. Which sound like pretty good reasons to cover the company and its products really.
“However, it’s the implications of this point that tell us something deeper about the newspaper industry:
Charles Arthur is the Guardian’s technology editor, and in his role has written many, but by no means all, of the stories featuring Apple in the past year. He said: ‘The statistics show that people read about Apple stuff. If a story involves the company, it gets huge readership.”
“People tend to read the stories about Apple. Thus stories about Apple tend to get written. We could be superficial and say that it’s just about getting the clicks on the website (and we could go meta-superficial on the same point about this piece itself). Or we could point to a deeper truth about newspapers, indeed all media outlets, themselves.
“Far from media forming the mindset of the readers and viewers the various outlets chase the pre-formed opinions of the various possible audiences. People who watch Fox News don’t have views that you disagree with because Fox has told them so. Rather, there are people who have different views and Fox has decided to chase their custom in a manner that CBS, or PBS, has decided not to. Those two have decided to chase the patronage of people who think as you do. Please do insert any media outlet at all and any viewpoint here, for all are doing exactly the same thing. It really isn’t a matter of changing people’s attitudes, it is of pandering to them.”
Read more here.
